Something’s amiss…

I just loaded Vista Ultimate RTM on my test host, and I tried extracting a paltry 300 meg zip file with some of my old docs on it… I don’t think it’s supposed to take 30 minutes to extract a 300 meg zip file… See here… I have even disabled AV for this operation, and Windows Defender is off… something isn’t right.

Click here to see the disturbing image.. Note the CPU hit.

Ok… I figured something out

The reason that sometimes I appear to be very intelligent, and that others I appear to be an idiot, is that I am an Air-Head. The scatterbrained code groking equivelant of a Valley Girl. No wonder.

Well, I guess they say that the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, but, somehow I don’t see that helping me. I’ll just accept it and move on.

RE: Breaking the rules of C# : After thought…

I noticed that I’m not the only one dissatisfied with the way that C# chooses overloads (Defaulting to the most ambiguously matching overload) In fact, these guys have a whole language (Nemerle) that sort of fixes all the stupid things about C# by making native the features that SHOULD have been included in C#1.0. (That isn’t their stated goal, but it seems to be the case in a lot of places… ) Looks like in a little while I’ll have to learn to grok nemerle… once things settle down for a bit, of course.

Disk Space Race Condition

Hah! This is one for the record books or something… I’m maintaining a production SQL Server 2000 host with about 20 databases on it. None of them are huge or anything, and the hard drive the data and backups live on has about 120 GB free at any given time… Last night during the backup rotation something happened in which the server created over it’s limit in temp files. I can’t tell exactly what was going on from a cursory look at it, (I’ll have to comb the logs more thoroughly) but some operation or set of operations make the temp directory exceed the 100+ GB of freespace that it had before it started the process. I found an old archive file containing 40 MB of data, which I deleted, and within 5 seconds 111 GB of free space opened back up. (That is not an exaggeration, 5 seconds.) Apparently whatever operation was waiting for space found enough in that 40 megabyte window and completed, freeing up the temp files… All I have to say is WTF! Who would have thought that could happen? The total amount data stored on the disk in database and log files is around 20 gigs, the hard drive itself is 300 Gigs, and there are various backup files laying around for the rotations to be able to keep two older backups of each database. So, that means that the simple operation of backing up 20 gigs of data triggered 110 - 120 gigs of temp files and caused the server to deadlock the operation (with good reason!) I guess that means that you need a LOT more space on the drive than your production data and backups… I mean there was still 500% of the data size left on the drive before the operation began, you’d think that would do it. Oh well. Lesson learned.

.NET 3.0 disappointment

I was ecstatic when I saw that .net 3.0 was released, but I was completely crushed when I saw that it didn’t include the 3.0 versions of the language compilers… Extending the architecture with the new framework additions is great and all, but the real meat of the new features in the pipeline as I saw it was LINQ and c# 3.0. Expression trees, and integrated queries are something that I’ve been anxiously waiting for… so I can only wonder why they released .net 3.0 without including the new 3.0 languages… I could have waited for Workflow… which still seems to be a good product in it’s own rite. (I’m a little disappointed in it as well since you have to pass parameters as a string,object dictionary, and not as something formal like… oh I don’t know Properties?) Overall it’s a step forward, but I’m still going to have to wait for the good stuff :/